Question

I’m trying to use the jQuery $.inArray function to iterate through an array and if there’s an element whose text contains a particular keyword, remove that element. $.inArray is only returning the array index though if the element’s text is equal to the keyword.

For example given the following array named ‘tokens’:

-   tokens  {...}   Object
    [0] "Starbucks^25^http://somelink"  String
    [1] "McDonalds^34^" String
    [2] "BurgerKing^31^https://www.somewhere.com"   String

And a call to removeElement(tokens, 'McDonalds'); would return the following array:

 -  tokens  {...}   Object
    [0] "Starbucks^25^http://somelink"  String
    [1] "BurgerKing^31^https://www.somewhere.com"   String

I’m guessing this may be possible using the jQuery $.grep or $.each function, or maybe regex. However, I’m not familiar enough with jQuery to accomplish this.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

grep is indeed the way to go.

function removeElement(array, keyword) {
    return $.grep(array, function (item, i) {
      return item.indexOf(keyword) > -1;
  }, true);
}

This looks for the keyword as a substring. If the elements of the array have a particular format (which they appear to, but it isn’t stated for certain), alter the test to match the format.

function removeElement(array, keyword) {
    var keyRE=new RegExp('^'+keyword+'^');
    return $.grep(array, function (item, i) {
      return keyRE.test(item);
  }, true);
}

Note the first ‘^’ is a meta-character matching the beginning of the string; the second simply matches a ‘^’ character.